Photographer snaps Cambridge genius in 21st century

By Paul Casciato

CAMBRIDGE, England, Oct 31 (Reuters Life!) - Nobel prizewinners, cleaners, top athletes, famed scientists, gardeners and promising young academics of the future have all looked down the lens of Howard Guest over the past 20 months.

The English photographer has been quietly getting around Cambridge university on a mission to create a modern snapshot of the people who have inherited the legacy of the renowned university passed down by such towering figures as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth.

In the process he's bandied words with one of the world's greatest moral philosophers, talked genetics in the garden with a double Nobel prizewinner on the subject, captured protests with student activist leaders and photographed Cambridge's most famous physicist Stephen Hawking.

Guest, who inherited his love of photography and his first camera from his mother, gave up an established career in finance to chase his dream of taking portraits.

"I live in Cambridge, so I was naturally drawn to the university, which is filled with fascinating people on the cutting edge of human knowledge," he said.

So he approached the university and persuaded it to make its people available as part of a drive to raise funds and burnish its profile ahead of its 800th anniversary in 2009.

"I suppose the most difficult photograph I've taken was Stephen Hawking because I normally chat endlessly with my subjects," Guest said.

Hawkings, author of a "Brief History of Time", is the current incumbent of the most famous academic chair in the world, the 330-year-old Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge. He has advanced motor neuron disease, is confined to a wheelchair and can only talk through a computer controlled by his eyes.